extremism
More cases of assault with a political motive
“Germany my fatherland, Est. 1949 East Germany lives and Germany above everything”: A participant at a right-wing rally. photo
© Arno Burgi/dpa
In 2021 and 2022, cases of assault with a political motive increased – the highest proportion can be attributed to the right-wing spectrum.
According to a preliminary count, the federal and state police authorities registered significantly more cases of physical injury with a political background than in the previous year. This emerges from a list by the federal government for the years 2021 and 2022.
According to this, a total of 1890 bodily harm offenses were registered nationwide in the area of politically motivated violent crime in 2021, a year later there were 2118 cases. However, in its response to a request from the AfD parliamentary group, the federal government points out that the number of cases for 2022 are still provisional, since late reports and changes are still possible until the statistics are published.
“The so-called “fight against the right” is taken very seriously by the government,” AfD MP Stephan Brandner commented on the figures. Other forms of violent extremism, on the other hand, are not given sufficient attention.
More than 1000 politically motivated acts of violence from the right spectrum
According to the preliminary figures, a little more than 1,000 of the nearly 3,600 politically motivated acts of violence in the past year were attributed to perpetrators from the right-wing spectrum, the federal government announced to its parliamentary group. In just over 700 cases, the police assume a left-wing ideological background.
Around 300 acts of violence were assigned to the “foreign ideology” category. This category includes, for example, crimes related to internal Turkish conflicts. In fewer than 50 cases, a religious ideology is assumed to be the motive – this is usually an Islamist sentiment. According to the information, almost 1,500 politically motivated violent crimes could not be clearly assigned to one of these categories ideologically.
In the case of the figures for politically motivated crime, the cases are already assigned at the beginning of the procedure; this is what is known as initial statistics.